Trade of Shame
Hay, William Anthony
Trade of Shame Hugh Thomas on the World of Slaving By William Anthony Hay Of all the iniquities of human history, the slave trade stands among the worst. Slave-trading was the equivalent of...
...African rulers whose kingdoms existed to provide slaves faced a choice: find another racket or fall...
...Cuba, the trade's last market, likewise saw a crackdown...
...He asks, Why did a trade in slaves begin in the 15th century, and why did it attract enough opposition to be abolished 400 years later...
...The United States and, to a lesser extent, Spain opposed inspection of ships under their flags, and international courts soon appeared to judge accused slavers...
...Even then, slaves were expensive, bought largely by Arabs...
...The relatively light penalties imposed by these courts dissuaded few, and anti-trading patrols actually added an element of excitement for some of the traders...
...Although Thomas's book is mammoth, the most comprehensive study we have, it is curiously limited...
...The slave trade ended only when Britain acted to cut off both the source and the demand...
...Absurd as this notion was, it encouraged a reliance on black slaves, stifling white immigration and free labor generally...
...As Thomas explains, the turn away from bringing white laborers to tropical colonies proved decisive...
...Diplomatic pressure forced Brazil to make the importation of slaves a crime...
...White indentured servants had been common in early North American and Caribbean colonies until whites came to be seen as unfit for physical labor under the sun...
...Turner's monumental painting Slave Ship (1840...
...Although slavery persisted in pockets of the Americas for a few more years, the Atlantic slave trade ended once and for all in 1870...
...The slaves on board were given even less food and water than before...
...He never quite explains why events unfolded as they did...
...Slavery in northern Europe had almost disappeared by the 13th century—feudalism offered a more efficient means of mobilizing labor...
...The case brought in 1783 of the British slave ship Zong, from which a captain two years before had cast slaves overboard during an outbreak of illness so as not to lose his cargo's insurance, caused great controversy and later inspired J.M.W...
...While Britain eventually became the largest trader in slaves, no one nation controlled the trade...
...It was, Thomas states, a truly international endeavor, involving businesses all across Europe and the Americas...
...Britain effectively prohibited slavery within its home territories in 1772 and banned the colonial trade in 1807 (as the United States would the next year...
...Then there is the question of responsibility: Louis Farrakhan and his followers insist that the Jews ran the trade, an argument that Thomas neatly dismisses...
...After 1700, French, Dutch, and English adventurers forced their way into the market...
...Take the anti-slavery cause: It made little headway when the slave trade revived during the Renaissance, but Thomas leaves open the question of what made it more effective in the late 18th century, the trade's height...
...Slave-trading was the equivalent of murder, since sea captains expected a proportion of slaves on each voyage to die...
...The British historian Hugh Thomas, in his massive new book The Slave Trade, overcomes these barriers to give a thorough account of William Anthony Hay is completing a doctorate in history at the University of Virginia...
...Any examination of the slave trade faces the formidable barriers of racial politics and white guilt...
...Exploration of the Atlantic islands and the New World made slavery a growth industry...
...But his account of Britain's involvement falters...
...It may seem odd to challenge a 900-page book for not developing its subject, but Thomas might have given up a few factual details to delve more deeply into the impact of slaving and the reasons for its decline...
...Thomas's erudition shows in his discussion of Iberia and its Latin American progeny (his specialty...
...Catholic rulers feared sending Arab or Berber slaves because they might spread Islam...
...Critics pointed out, realistically, that the trade ban would worsen the conditions under which captives were shipped, because slaves would now be crammed into vessels designed to sail at short notice and to escape detection...
...John Wesley and Samuel Johnson damned slavery, with Johnson even raising a toast to the next slave revolt in the West Indies...
...Although slaves performed all sorts of work, the introduction of sugar cultivation raised the demand for captives and sparked a boom in the trade...
...Several British expeditions destroyed slaving bases that had existed for centuries, and the effort led Britain and other European nations to take direct control over stretches of Africa's coast in order to halt the trade...
...blacks from West Africa provided a ready alternative for a labor-hungry market...
...At the time, slavery lacked a racial connotation, as slaves came from across Europe and Africa...
...Most black slaves were taken from Ethiopia and Sudan until Moorish trade with West Africa developed through the Sahara...
...Yet slave trading persisted because, as Thomas demonstrates, it could not be separated from slave holding...
...A greater number of royal families—African and European—participated in the slave trade than Jewish ones...
...Of course, quick death might have been preferable to the prolonged agony of life in bondage...
...Along the Mediterranean, a different situation pre-vailed—the Arab invasion of Spain and the subsequent Spanish recon-quest brought slavery back into the Iberian peninsula on a large scale...
...Where, we might well ask, are our generation's abolitionists...
...He does suggest, however, that the evils of slavery became better known...
...One African prince, distrustful of British motives, insisted on a clause in an 1841 treaty giving his people the right to revive the trade if British subjects entered into it again...
...In 1815, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, sought an international ban at the Congress of Vienna and won it...
...Enforcement of the worldwide ban on slaving devolved mainly on the Royal Navy...
...It continues to do its ugly business in Sudan and Mauritania, with little condemnation from the civilized world...
...Thomas describes the result as an expanding trade in Africans that was controlled by Portugal...
...the Atlantic trade's rise and fall...
...And what about the slavery of more recent times, indeed of our day...
...Not only did West Africa become accessible, but, as Thomas describes, Spaniards, already familiar with slavery at home, established it in the Caribbean, importing slaves as disease decimated the indigenous peoples...
...Africans themselves defended the trade and eagerly provided slaves to buyers in Cuba and Brazil...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 7
